


An Englishman in Gotham

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23346616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: When you're raised by an Englishman, how do you know the correct pronunciation of 'rather'?
Comments: 33
Kudos: 345





	An Englishman in Gotham

**Author's Note:**

> If you would prefer to hear this in podfic form, you may listen to it [read by the author here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23348563).

“What do you think of it?” Alfred was holding a wooden spoon over a pot of custard, and he extended the spoon to Bruce, perched on the stool beside the stove. Bruce closed his eyes and swallowed the warm slide of custard. He shut his eyes at the deliciousness of it. 

“Do you like it?” Alfred said. 

“Rather!” Bruce said. Alfred set the spoon down and grabbed a clean one, returning to his custard. 

“Don’t say rather,” Alfred said, frowning into the pot.

“Why? Is it wrong? Is it a swear? You say it all the time!”

“Yes,” Alfred said, and the boy could make no sense of the strange abstraction of his expression. He had displeased Alfred in some way, which filled him with a vague panic. “I meant that you should say rather, instead of rather.” He pronounced the two words differently: _ra-ther_ instead of _rah-ther._ The flat nasal Americanism of _ra-ther_ sounded odd on Alfred’s tongue. 

“I like the way you say it better,” Bruce said. 

“You’re an American. You ought to pronounce your words in the American way.”

Bruce looked puzzled. “Why?” 

“Well,” Alfred began, wiping his hands. He was not meeting Bruce’s eyes. “Because eventually you will be going to school – a proper school, not just tutors. And the other boys and girls will be, most of them, Americans, and you want them to be able to understand you, yes?”

“But I can understand you just fine.”

“Yes, well, they might. . . they might not like it.”

“Why?”

Alfred gave an exasperated sigh. “They might. . . I don’t know, they might suppose you to be putting on airs, or some sort of thing.”

“Putting on airs,” Bruce said thoughtfully, trying out the expression.

“_Airs_,” Alfred corrected, emphasizing the “r” of it. Flattening it so it sounded more American.

“_Airs_,” Bruce mimicked. He hated the way it sounded. “Do you want me to talk that way? Like an American?”

Alfred was looking very interested in his custard. “Yes,” he said curtly.

Bruce stared at the floor and tried very hard to will the tears away. Here he had been making Alfred angry all this time. Alfred sounded so angry with him. Alfred was ashamed of him. Alfred hated the way he talked. He resolved never to open his mouth again. There was some hot hard feeling in his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said gravely. He worked very hard to make it sound like it did when people talked on the television – _I’m sah-ree_, instead of the more natural _I’m sore-y_ that his tongue wanted to do. 

The spoon went unexpectedly flying across the room. Bruce stared in astonishment at it. At first he couldn’t figure out what had happened. He had never seen Alfred throw something before. He had thrown the spoon so hard it had hit the rack of metal pots across the kitchen and clattered to the floor. Alfred was gripping the stove very hard, and he was breathing hard too. 

“No,” he said. “I’m the one who’s sorry, dear boy. Please, forget everything I’ve just said. Forget it entirely. Put it from your head. I was wrong.”

“All right,” Bruce said. He was profoundly confused. He had thought Alfred was angry at him, but now Alfred looked like he was angry about something else. “But I can try to talk American, if you want. If you. . . if you don’t like the way I talk.”

“I very much like the way you talk,” Alfred said. He shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he looked like himself again. “Might you. . . might you do me a favor?” he said.

“Yes!” Bruce said brightly. The prospect of doing Alfred a favor was a happy one, if a bit unusual. Alfred looked like he was considering his words carefully.

“Would you. . . when you are not here, with me—when you are, for example, with your parents—might you give it a try then, to speak in a more American fashion?”

“Of course I shall,” Bruce said, and because he was now listening for it, he could hear how closely his intonation and pitch matched Alfred’s. He could hear that it was like Alfred’s voice. 

“Good boy,” Alfred said. “You know,” he said after he had fetched another spoon and returned to his custard, “you were telling me the other day that you were thinking you might like to be a spy.”

“Oh yes!” Bruce said. “I was reading about the history of espionage in the way long ago, like the sixteen something.”

Alfred raised his head, looked thoughtful. “Ah,” he said, as though he had deciphered something. “_Es_-pee-oh-nahj,” he said, and Bruce nodded, because it was not a word he had ever heard aloud before, and Alfred always helped him with the words. 

“Yes, espionage,” Bruce said, trying on the correct pronunciation. “Did you know that Lady Carlisle was a double agent, and she helped the queen escape from the Pre—the Presubuh. . .”

“Presbyterians.”

“Yes, them! Were they a dangerous enemy?”

“According to my aunt Louisa. Did you know that spies have to learn to speak many different languages?”

“They do?”

“Most assuredly. And they have to learn to speak them with native fluency, lest anyone suspect them. Why Lady Carlisle spoke at least five languages.”

“Wow,” Bruce said. “Will I have to learn to do that?”

“You already know how to do it,” Alfred said, wiping his hands. He was back to himself after the incident with the spoon, and Bruce was beginning to wonder if it had even happened at all – it had been so unexpected, so out of character. Alfred must have had a seizure, or something like that. 

“I do?”

“You do. When you and I are speaking here in the kitchen, like this – when it’s just the two of us, I mean – then we may speak however we like. But when you are upstairs or with your parents, you must speak with an American accent. They are two different dialects of the same language, but if you can master them both, you can move in more than one world. Just like the spies did.”

“Ohhh.” Bruce’s eyes widened at the thought of it. A secret language that was only for him and Alfred? It made his heart beat fast just to think of it. 

“And you must learn to speak both of them very well indeed. Do you think you can do that? Can you be like one of those spies in your book, gathering information, making everyone think you are one of them?” 

Bruce nodded enthusiastically. “I can do that,” he said, and then he practiced. “I can do _that_,” he said, flattening the ‘a’ of his _that_ just enough, so it sounded more like the TV. 

“Excellent, Master Bruce.”

He gave a little bow of the head. “Thank you, Master Alfred.”

“Such a good spy as this deserves, I believe, an entire bowl of warm custard,” Alfred said, and he took a ladle and spooned some of the rich yellow concoction into a bowl and stuck a spoon in it. Bruce’s mouth watered. 

“And some for me as well, I think,” Alfred said, getting himself a bowl too. Bruce stuck the spoon in his mouth and savored it. There was nothing like Alfred’s custard, lovingly stirred to gooey lushness in the big copper double boiler. 

“I adore custard,” Bruce sighed. And then he tried it the other way, the American way, flattening everything and making the consonants much harsher: “I adorrr cus-terrrd.”

Alfred knocked his bowl against Bruce’s. The smile was back on Alfred’s face. “Cheers,” he said, and “Cheers,” Bruce said. “Do you think I’d be good at being a spy?”

He looked like he was considering it, which Bruce liked. Too often grown-ups treated it like it was a joke, when he talked about the things he wanted to be when he grew up. But Alfred always thought about it carefully, and pointed out the good things and bad things about each job that Bruce had so far considered – herpetologist, robot dinosaur engineer, pastry chef. “I think you would be remarkably good at it,” Alfred said. “But you should also consider that spies might have to do things they don’t particularly like doing. Spies have to follow the orders of their superiors, even when they think those orders are wrong.”

“Like what sort of orders?”

“For instance, spies have to carry weapons and hurt people. They might want you to hurt the wrong person, and you wouldn’t like that.”

Bruce thought about that one. “Well, if I thought it was wrong, then I just wouldn’t do it.”

“Well then you’d be out of a job.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well then I expect I’d better be a butler, like you. That way no one would ever tell me to do anything that was wrong.”

Alfred was poking at his custard. He said nothing, and they finished their custard in silence. Bruce set his bowl in the sink when he was done and rinsed it out, and then he skipped off down the passageway to see if he could sneak some time down in the carriage house, where he was building a snake habitat. Persuading the few garden snakes he could find to make it their permanent home had been frustrating, however; they were always slithering off for greener pastures, and then he had to go find them again. “Boots on!” Alfred called after him, and “Ugggh!” Bruce exclaimed, but he grabbed up a pair of garden boots on his way out the door into the spring sunshine. He could always ditch them at the end of the brick path where the hedge hid him from view, and Alfred would be none the wiser.

* * *

“Not exactly how I was hoping to spend my evening,” came his father’s voice through the closed door. “A long day at the hospital, and now this?”

“_This_ has been on the calendar for over a month,” his mother said. Her voice was lower and harder to hear through the door. She would probably be tying his tie. Bruce had his back pressed to the corner, listening to them dress before a party, the way he loved to do. The double doors to their bedroom were thick, but there was an inch and a half of clearance underneath them, and he could always hear what they were saying, if he was very still. There was a sound like her dress swishing on the floor.

“Besides,” she was saying, “this is a cause you actually care about.”

“Right now the cause I mainly care about is crawling into bed and sleeping for a week.”

“Ah, but then you’d miss me in this dress.”

“Mm, you’re right, it is very much a dress not to be missed.” There was more rustling, and an indistinct sound. Probably they were kissing. 

“Well at least we’re not hosting this one,” his father said, and his voice sounded softer now. It always sounded like that after there had been kissing. Like kissing his mother absorbed some of her into him. 

“I have some terrible news about that,” she said, and then something else he couldn’t hear. She would be walking into her closet now, probably fetching a wrap, considering another pair of shoes. 

“That’s next _week_?” his father said. 

“Afraid so, darling. Not quite as easy to escape when we’re the ones hosting, I know. But it’s going to be wonderful, I’ve already seen to all the arrangements. And I was thinking Bruce might like to attend this one. Though he’s gone quite feral this spring, it’s going to require bathing him for about three days straight beforehand.” But there was a musical laugh at the end of it, and the click of her heels across the floor.

“Well at least he’s not talking like the servants anymore.”

“Oh, it was never that bad.”

“The hell it wasn’t,” his father grumbled. “What the hell is wrong with this tie? And yes it was that bad, I’m not introducing him around to Gotham society sounding like that. It’s because of that fucking butler.”

“Nice language,” she said, and in the silence Bruce knew she was working on his tie again. 

“Well, it’s better now that I had a talk with him.”

“With Bruce? Darling, he’s seven, he can’t control how he sounds.”

“No, I talked to Pennyworth about it, told him to cut it out. I’m not paying him an arm and a leg to turn my son into Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“I think an arm and a leg might be a wild overstatement of Alfred’s salary. Oh, hold still. Your cuffs are a disgrace.”

Bruce pressed his back against the corner until his spine ached. He had dared. He had dared. He had dared talk to Alfred like that. He felt a surge of something inside him, something dark and hot, and he was surprised to discover that it was hatred. He hated his father. He could have kicked him, could have hit him, could have ripped off his stupid tie and stomped on it. The way he had said _like the servants._ The word sounded like when Hobbs the gardener said _fungus._ What he had called Alfred. _That fucking butler._ No, it wasn’t his father’s tie he would happily have ground under his heel – it was his face. 

And then the door opened and his mother swept out, on her way to fetch something from her sitting room across the hall, probably. Normally Bruce evaporated at the first sound of someone’s approach, slipped into the back stairwell that was next to their door. Back a hundred years ago, when the house had had a full complement of staff, that had been the maids’ staircase, Alfred had told him, so that the chief lady’s maid could bring her mistress’s breakfast tray first thing in the morning. There was a disused dumb waiter beside it, which Bruce loved to climb into, even though it made Alfred furious at how dangerous it was.

Bruce was still as a stone, curled into the corner, but she saw him there. She met his eyes, and he saw in her eyes that she knew what he must have heard. Saw it in his cold level gaze. 

“Darling—” she said. 

She licked her lips, like she was going to say something more. Like she was looking for something to say. And then she looked away, and swept on into the sitting room. Bruce uncurled his legs and ran down the back stairwell, not even trying to be quiet any more. 

That night in his room, after they had gone to the party, after Alfred had tucked him in, he stared at the ceiling and thought some more about what he had heard. About how his mother had looked. The words his father had said. 

“Fucking,” he whispered into the dark, trying it out. But he knew enough to know the word could be a verb too, even if it was not one he himself had tried before. “Fuck them,” he whispered. It was an enormously satisfying phrase, so he said it again, and louder. “Fuck them,” he repeated. He tried it both the American way and the British way, going back and forth between them, _fuck them, fuck them, fuck them,_ relishing the different taste of it in his mouth.

* * *

He opened his eyes and tried to focus again on what his monitor was telling him, tried to make sense of the readings on it, the spikes and valleys. What a strange memory to lose himself in. What had made him think of it? It must have been the voice analysis he was running, the different accents layered one on top of the other. He reached for his coffee cup and discovered it was empty. When Alfred stopped silently refilling it, it was his signal that work had gone on long enough. He heard Alfred’s step on the stairs behind him. 

“A tray for you, sir,” he said, setting it down beside the monitor station. Bruce gazed at it balefully.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“Chamomile tea, sir. An excellent restorative that promotes sleep and relaxation, both of which are in short supply around here.”

“I don’t want chamomile tea.”

“With sugar cubes,” Alfred said, holding up a little dish of them. Bruce glared at them. 

“What I would like is some more coffee, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“As it happens it very much is. Ah look, I happen to have brought two cups, so we can have a nice spot of tea together before we both turn in for the night. Or should I say morning.”

“Alfred,” he said tightly, “I am on a timetable here, and that means I need to finish this within the next hour. Lawn clippings soaked in hot water will not help me put a stop to the abductions and murders happening in the Narrows, even as we’re sitting here.”

“Mm. Made much progress, have you?”

“It’s—” He rubbed at his forehead. “It’s slow going at the moment, but—”

“You’ve been staring at the same screen for forty-five minutes. Master Bruce, your brain is too exhausted to take in any more information. Drink your chamomile tea, try to get at least a few hours’ sleep, and come to it with fresh eyes. I guarantee it will go faster, and what’s more you know it.” Alfred handed him the cup, and Bruce gave it a suspicious glance.

“Did you drug it?”

“Master Bruce, would I stoop to such a thing?”

“Oh please,” Bruce murmured. He tipped his head against the back of the chair, let his eyes close for just a moment. Possibly sleep would not come amiss right now. He drained the cup, and set it down on its saucer. Perhaps the tea was drugged after all. Or perhaps his exhausted body had just reached the threshold of what it was capable of. Maybe he would just shut his eyes and sleep right here. 

“Do you know what I was thinking of,” he said quietly, and he let his tongue slip into its old accustomed shapes, the sounds that were just for the two of them.

“What’s that, sir.”

“I was thinking about your custard.”

“Shall I stir up a pot of it for breakfast then?”

He murmured something indistinct. He must have fallen asleep right there, because when he woke he was covered in a warm blanket that had clearly been imported from upstairs. It smelled of Penhaligon, which was to say, of Alfred’s aftershave. Bruce let his eyes drift shut again, and tried to slip back into the dream he had just been inhabiting – a dream in which the scent of the quilt became the scent of his mother’s dress as she was getting ready for a party, and there were kitchen smells too. But Alfred was yelling at him because he had brought in a snake to give it a sponge bath in the kitchen sink, and Alfred didn’t seem to understand that the water from the hose outside was too cold, and the snake might get a chill. And then his hands were covered in dirt from the garden, and he got his mother’s dress dirty right before the party, and his father threw a spoon across the room, and it kept hitting the pot repeatedly, this high metallic _ping ping ping_.

He sat up and pushed the blanket off him – it had been his monitor pinging at him. The voice maps that had been swimming in front of his eyes just a few hours ago suddenly fell into place, and he began typing, quickly assorting and assimilating data, letting it lead him. What had seemed an impossible tangle last night was now a clear way forward, and the conclusions were obvious where before everything had been fogged. 

He reached for his coffee mug beside him, which felt piping hot – God bless Alfred – and was almost stabbed in the mouth by the silver spoon standing upright in it. He recoiled, stared at the cup. Why was his coffee. . . yellowish? And thick? And. . . he laughed aloud. Plucked out the spoon, licked it clean, and propped his feet up to enjoy his breakfast of warm, rich custard. 

“I take it the custard is to your satisfaction,” Alfred said behind him, as he tidied up. 

“Rather,” Bruce sighed.


End file.
